Toni Morrison's Monumental Impact on Literature and Culture Will Be Felt For Centuries to Come

Toni Morrison, the celebrated American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, has died at 88. News of her passing was reported by Knopf, her longtime publisher, who said that she died in New York City after a brief illness.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931, Morrison lived a peerless life in letters. Her literary education began in Lorain, Ohio, where she grew up reading Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. In her youth, Morrison studied English at Howard University, then went on to earn a master's degree from Cornell University.

Leonardo Cendamo

Before she became a writer in her own right, Morrison was a book editor who remodeled the literary establishment, transforming what was possible for black writers in midcentury America. In 1965, Morrison began working as an editor at the textbook division of Random House. Two years later, she became Random House’s first black female senior editor in the fiction division. Among the first books she worked on was Contemporary African Literature, published in 1972, an anthology that brought Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Athol Fugard to American audiences. She championed a new generation of African American authors, including Gayl Jones and Angela Davis, and published the celebrated autobiography of Muhammad Ali.

Throughout her early years as an editor, Morrison, who was raising two children as a single mother after the dissolution of her marriage, rose every morning at 4 a.m. to write. Those mornings produced The Bluest Eye, her first novel, which was published in 1970. Set in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, the groundbreaking novel explores the insidious evils of internalized racism. In the years to follow, Morrison published prolifically, and her work garnered a number of prestigious honors. In 1973, Sula was nominated for the National Book Award; a few years later, in 1977, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it became the first novel by a black writer selected for the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son was chosen in 1940. In 1983, Morrison left book publishing to write novels and teach at both Rutgers University and the State University of New York.

Toni Morrison and Oprah Winfrey at film premiere of Winfrey’s Beloved, based on Morrison’s novel.

Marion Curtis

In 1987, Morrison published Beloved, a novel about a former slave haunted by the ghost of the infant daughter she killed in an effort to save her from a life of slavery. Though the novel was widely celebrated, it failed to garner prestigious awards, leading a group of 48 black critics and writers, among them Maya Angelou, to publish a letter of protest in The New York Times, stating, “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison, she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve.” Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and to this day it remains Morrison’s best known novel, a totemic work of fiction about the psychological toll of slavery and the indelible bonds between mothers and daughters. Jazz and Paradise followed, forming a trilogy.

In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her commendation celebrated her novels, “characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” and celebrated her ability to “give life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 1996, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a prestigious lifetime achievement honor bestowed upon other such luminaries as John Updike, Stephen King, and Isabel Allende.

When Oprah Winfrey named four of Morrison’s novels to her eponymous book club, Morrison experienced a career resurgence, allowing her work to reach a wider audience than ever before. “It is impossible to actually imagine the American literary landscape without a Toni Morrison,” Winfrey once said of Morrison. “She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller.”

In her later years, Morrison’s life in academia redoubled. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held a prestigious post at Princeton University, where she created the Princeton Atelier, which brought worthy students together with prominent writers and artists. In 2017, Princeton dedicated a building (Morrison Hall) in her honor. Her papers remain part of Princeton’s permanent collection.

Morrison’s work is characterized by magical realism, luscious prose, and an unflinching eye toward the wounds of history. She unpacked race as a social construct, excavating the profound psychological tolls of racism and sexism.

“The function of freedom is to free someone else,” Morrison once wrote. Her novels have freed so many, as has her service as an editor and teacher who made other writers’ work possible. Her impact will be felt for centuries to come.

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